Qualcomm announced the next version of the company's popular Snapdragon mobile chipset at an analyst's meeting Wednesday. The MSM8960 will combine a 1.2-Ghz, dual-core processor with LTE, CDMA, and UMTS radios to become the heart of top smartphones in late 2011.

The new Snapdragon family actually includes several chipsets that will be available next year, mixing in a bunch of technologies that we've been hearing about for a while. The first chip, the 8960, offers options for the LTE networks AT&T and Verizon are setting up, AT&T and T-Mobile's HSPA+ networks, Verizon's and Sprint's EVDO, and even CDMA 1X Advanced, a way of extending voice capacity on Sprint's and Verizon's older networks.

Qualcomm said the new chip will have four times the graphics performance of previous Snapdragon processors and five times the processing speed, while using only a quarter of the power. It's designed using a 28-nanometer process, which we haven't seen in mobile chipsets in the wild yet.

Snapdragon was the first mobile processor to break the 1-GHz barrier, but it has found intense competition in the past year. Qualcomm, TI, and Samsung are constantly one-upping each other in power, with Marvell not far behind and Nvidia readying a dual-core chipset for next year. Since all of these processors use the ARM instruction set, they're all compatible; the competition has been pretty much entirely good news for manufacturers and consumers.

Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 devices, as well as most LG and HTC smartphones, use Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors. Motorola and HP/Palm smartphones use Qualcomm chips and TI's OMAP. RIM BlackBerrys tend to use either Qualcomm or Marvell. Samsung uses Qualcomm and Samsung processors, and Apple uses its own mysterious A4 chip, about which the company refuses to release details.

Manufacturers won't need the new chipsets to design LTE phones. The first LTE phone, the Samsung Craft, came out on MetroPCS with separate LTE and CDMA modems running in parallel. But the integrated 8960 will make it much easier to pump out powerful smartphones that work on 3G and 4G networks. Verizon Wireless chief executive Lowell McAdam has promised a big reveal of a half-dozen LTE devices at January's CES trade show—let's see if he has anything to say about these new chips.